Game Authority for Robust Distributed Selfish-Computer Systems (Preliminary Version)

Report, 2006

Game theory has an elegant way of modeling some structural aspects of social games. The predicted outcome of the social games holds as long as ?the rules of the game? are kept. Therefore, a game authority (which enforces the ?rules?) is implied. We present the first design for that game authority, and the first suiting middleware for executing an algorithmic mechanism in distributed systems. The middleware restricts the agents to ?play by the rules?, and excludes non-selfish agents since we consider them as Byzantine. We base our design on a self-stabilizing Byzantine agreement that allows processors to audit each other?s actions. We show that when the agents are restricted to act selfishly the resource allocation is asymptotically optimal (according to our novel performance ratio; multi-round anarchy cost). Our design also includes services that allow owners to share a collaborative effort for coalition optimization using group-preplay negotiation. Since there are no guarantees for successful termination of selfish negotiations, we consider ?democratic? approaches for promoting ?free choice?.